Avellone “very tempted” by D&D-free Planescape Kickstarter

Legendary RPG designer Chris Avellone has some idea of where a crowd-funded follow up to Planescape: Torment, and it doesn’t involve sticking to the Dungeons & Dragons ruleset.

Speaking to GamesIndustry, the Obsidian creative director said he’s “very tempted” by the idea of a Kickstarter to fund a sequel to the 1999 Black Isle classic, but wouldn’t make a direct sequel.

“To be honest I don’t know if I’d want to do it as a Planescape game – I think a better approach would be to ignore the D&D mechanics and respect what Planescape was trying to do and what the game did and see if you can do what Fallout did when it became the spiritual successor to Wasteland,” he said.

“I think if you made a game using some of the concepts of Planescape, the metaphysical ideas and the plane travel, without using the D&D mechanics, you could actually come up with a much better game.”

Avellone said the D&D base “got in the way of the experience” sometimes and Black Isle had to discard quite a few of the gaming system’s mechanics.

“We had to ignore certain spells, change up the class mechanic so that you can switch at any time you like by remembering abilities. That was stuff that D&D didn’t allow for, it was to restraining in some respects,” he said.

“If we did do a spiritual successor, then I don’t know if we’d use the Planescape licence or attach the mechanics, perhaps something that has a different feel to Torment.”

Hit the link above for Avellone’s thoughts on Kickstarter, and on working with inXile on Wasteland 2.

Planescape: Torment is considered one of the highpoints of an era renowned for excellent CRPGs. It’s available through GOG.com.